


The Anatomy of a Garden

by RiffsRosesRavens



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, spoilers for campaign 1, vax mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:28:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29215710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiffsRosesRavens/pseuds/RiffsRosesRavens
Summary: 20 years ago, something happened on the side of the road near Emon. There are many different ways to tell the tale, but all contain three elements the same. A woman traveling alone. A god of death. And a secret that must never be found.
Relationships: Keyleth/Vax'ildan (Critical Role)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24
Collections: Legend of the Red Tempest





	The Anatomy of a Garden

This garden hasn’t always been here.

I know how that must sound. Emon itself has produced enough advertisements to etch this place backwards into history. Even the oldest residents of the closest towns swear that the garden is as old as the land below it.

Here, I want you to look, really look, at everything surrounding us. See the storm breath roses surrounding the dais, the honeysuckle vine dangling down around them from the sundial’s dome. At their root, these stone paths we walk spread outward in a branching pattern. The farther out, the more the plants vary. Druid sacred plants in the center: dragon’s wing, cloud caps, aerodytica, water weed, mother’s milk blossoms, creeping vine, rock moss. Rare and international plants in the outer branches: Marqueesian blue palm, the deep sea lily, deadly fiend bramble, Issylran fairy teeth, Wildemount ruby grape.

The stone wall and the steps leading up and out of the garden.

Sorry, the crater.

Because we are standing in a crater. A massive one; 200 feet across perhaps. Very lucky. If the explosion had been ten degrees hotter or twenty feet west, it would have taken out the road, disrupted trade routes.

And yet no one witnessed it. In fact, the only odd thing seen on this road in the last, say, twenty or so years, was darkness.

Complete and total darkness.

Rain.

Lightning.

The sour smell of death in the air.

Twenty years ago there was a stand of trees here, a clearing, and a fire pit used by miscellaneous travelers. A half-elven woman was passing through alone, dressed in drab grey and black clothes. To the unknowing eye, she was a simple woman looking for work and a place to rest, but had she pulled down her hood and shown her bright red hair and antler circlet, many would recognize her as a member of the infamous Vox Machina, saviors of Tal’dorei - one of the most powerful druids in the world.

Alone in a stand of trees on the side of the road in the middle of the night.

The usual way that gods find us.

She sat right here, painted in the monochrome of shadow and light cast by the dying embers before her. She was (maybe) too thin, or (maybe) gaunt and hollow in her face. Her shoulders would have sagged with a fresh and hefty weight, her cheeks perpetually salt stained. Around her, her travelling goods were thrown into rough piles of dirty things. She hadn’t stopped walking for weeks, back and forth across the wilderness.

Then, in a breath, the stars shrank away and a blanket of darkness fell around the clearing. All sound, all movement, muffled. A figure stepping into the clearing with her; a porcelain white face over a black cloak, as small as a woman and as tall as the shadows.

“What do you want?” the Voice of the Tempest asked the Goddess of Death.

“Peace.”

“Fuck you,” the Voice snapped.

“I bring a warning,” Death offered, and in her voice, a shiver. A disturbance.

“Take it to someone else.” The Voice turned away, heading to the small lean-to of twined foliage she’d built in the twilight.

Death watched her, cocked her head, and slowly shrank until she was just an old woman wearing just an old mask.

“The choice to be made is yours and only yours,” she said, sitting with an unnatural stillness next to the fire.

Keyleth snarled, her fists clenching around her bedclothes.

“I don’t want it, anything, that comes from you, if it isn’t him,” she yelled across the clearing.

“And if it comes from him?” the woman asked.

And, if we’re honest, she should have snapped her neck, Keyleth, at the frankly fucked up velocity with which she whipped her head around and launched herself back towards the fire.

“What? A message? Just tell me goddamit!”

“You should sit.”

“I swear to the gods-”

“Sit”

So she sat, and the god of death folded her hands over her lap and stared at her with unnatural obsidian eyes.

“You, Keyleth, are of your own free will. You owe me nothing and have no contract with me. This matter in no way affects Vax’ildan’s servitude to me. Here, you bear sole responsibility and power. Do you understand?”

Keyleth’s brow had knit together somewhere in the middle of the second sentence, her hands clenching again in her own lap. Her anguish, crackling under her skin like electricity, had abandoned the anger for a weary, worn-out fear.

“I understand.”

The woman, Death, seemed to take a deep breath.

“You are with child.”

For the record, Keyleth, Voice of the Tempest, did not collapse. Though, that might have been better. If she had collapsed, she wouldn’t have heard what was coming next.

“The baby should not exist. Vax’ildan, in his undead state, should not have been able to bear life. But, I can sense it within you, and I can sense it because your daughter is also part of me. It is not unlike the power felt after the conception of a demigod, and yet her parents are both mortal. This is unprecedented. A child of god magic created through the natural method is theorized to be impossible. And it is my duty to tell you that the likelihood of her incompatibility with the prime material is high. Many children of mortals and gods die in infancy. The coupling is imperfect at best and cruel at worst. It is this reason that I have come directly to tell you. Your pregnancy will not be regular, and you must be prepared if that is what you wish.” The god’s words were clipped close and formal, just as she had always been, just as if this was business as usual.

Keyleth couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move or think. Her hands had moved to her stomach and pressed there hard enough to hurt.

“A daughter. Our daughter? If I wish? And she’ll just die?” and with every word her voice cracks and tumbles higher, eyes wide with tears.

“It’s a distinct possibility.”

“All because… of what YOU made him. What you DID to him,” Keyleth’s eyes narrowed as her words grew harsher, her skin growing hot and painful.

“As I said, it should not-”

“Be possible? Well that certainly fucking worked out for you didn’t it?” Keyleth yelled.

The god of death nodded, “Do with the information what you will,” and the god of death stood up and began to grow and change back into a visage of a former creature.

“No, don’t you DARE WALK AWAY FROM ME!” Keyleth screamed. She bolted to her feet and charged after the retreating shadow

Of course, there is no catching a god. Not when they are already out of reach and incorporeal to begin with.

As her hands closed on nothing, Keyleth wept and screamed obscenities into the shrouded clearing.

She lost the love of her life.

She would nearly certainly lose their only child.

How had this happened?

Sobbing, she dropped to her knees, her fingers curling into the dirt where wisps of smoke began rising into the air. She was hot, so hot, like molten metal was being poured over her in waves of death and grief.

She lifted her head to the sky and screamed.

The intake of breath pulled the air from miles away, and the exhale, the raw suffering sound, exploded outward in a ball of fire 200 feet high and 200 feet across. The ground beneath her shattered and crumbled away. The flames licked at her skin, evaporating her tears right off her face. As it left her body, it left a void of sorrow so deep that there was no sound left to make, and Keyleth collapsed in on herself, cradling her abdomen as she cried.

Some think it’s not a coincidence what grows here in this crater. They say it’s the druid magic that soaked into the earth that day slowly leaking to the surface. Others argue that no amount of powerful magic could create the strict organization of the plants. Someone had to tend to this garden, long ago, when no one knew it was here.

The Voice of the Tempest still oversees her people to this day, but no one knows what happened to the child. It’s most likely that she died shortly after birth, if she was even born at all. 


End file.
